Three plead guilty to piracy charges

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Three members of a global computer piracy ring admitted on
Thursday they shuttled millions of dollars in computer games,
movies and software around the world through a coded system of
websites and chat rooms.

The men pleaded guilty in US District court to federal copyright
charges, becoming the first people convicted in what the US Justice
Department said was the largest-ever investigation into software
piracy.

Their arrests came after FBI agents in New Haven spent more than
a year looking into the underground "Warez" community on the
internet.

"It's a competition of different groups racing to release
pirated software over the internet," said Seth Kleinberg, a
26-year-old Los Angeles man who, with a high-school education and a
home computer, cracked the computer industry's toughest copyright
protections.

Kleinberg, who lives with his father, faces between five and six
years in prison when he is sentenced in July.

He pleaded guilty along with Jeffrey Lerman, 20, a University of
Maryland student from Long Island, and Albert Bryndza, 32 of New
York.

The investigation, dubbed "Operation Higher Education" spanned
the US and about a dozen foreign countries, prosecutors said.

The FBI recently built a state-of-the-art computer crimes
facility in the New Haven field office to handle internet
investigations.